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How Icaros Desktop Brings the Amiga Experience To x86 PCs
angry tapir writes "Icaros Desktop is an effort to build a modern Amiga-compatible operating system to standard x86 hardware. It's a distribution built atop AROS, which is an open source effort to create a system compatible at the API level with the AmigaOS 3.x series. I recently had a chat to the creator of Icaros, Paolo Besser, about the creation of the OS and why Amiga continues to inspire people today."
Evar!
The x86 architecture is actually still used a lot on the desktop and server market, but I understand what you mean. It's pretty dead in the tablets and cellphone market, the largest market for processors.
c++;
Hardly. Ten years ago, maybe.
I have to say this project upsets me.
Why? Because if it had been completed fifteen years ago, it'd have been something I'd (and millions of other Amiga enthusiasts) would have been able to jump on, and over time it would have grown. The issues with Exec's lack of MMU support would have been, as time progressed, dealt with in an evolutionary way (I have no idea what the solution would have been, but I'm pretty sure it would have come about.) And so the platform would have lived on.
Unfortunately it wasn't completed then, and the mindshare has moved to GNU/Linux. The problems with AmigaOS back in 1994 are still present in AROS. There's no easy way to fix the issues any more, because the people interested aren't tight knit and large enough to actually agree upon a way forward.
Which is NOT, absolutely NOT, to diss the efforts of the AROS crew. What they've produced is impressive, and anyone who thinks all operating systems should either be POSIX or Windows based should, absolutely should, download this and play with it.
What upsets me is that I can't, any longer, jump on something so wonderful. There's no point.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
No, it was the OS. The OS was fantastic. I'd have been much more comfortable jumping to ix86 back in the mid 1990s if AmigaOS had been available then.
The hardware was fantastic in 1985. In 1990, it was OK but looking a little odd. By the time AGA finally rolled out, there were serious concerns amongst many in the Amiga community that the Amiga hardware was already way behind the PC and Mac. And, of course, infamously, it was about that time that Carmack made it clear that Doom would never be ported to the Amiga due to hardware concerns, despite it running on the lowest end PCs of that era.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Hobbyists are more then enough to justify it. If they get a kick out ouf playing with AmigaOS then good for them. Some people play games, some people read, some people waterski, and some people enjoy playing with old tech. Not sure why people get so butthurt over what other people do with their free time.
Yeah. What we need is a Linux kernel module that traps userland segmentation faults and throws a kernel panic. XD
I love all my Amigas; I fought on the epic frontlines of the Amiga versus Atari BBS flamewars before most of you were an ache in your daddys' groins. I carried the Boing Ball flag into harm's way too many times to count. But the true Amiga experience, as depicted by connoisseurs, requires abandonment of such niceties as memory protection and process isolation.
The hardcore nostalgics forget that the Amiga didn't have memory protection first because the hardware wasn't routinely available, and more importantly because the seamless memory map allowed all of RAM to be a huge playground for the CPU and custom co-processors to accomplish amazing things at less than 8 Mhz. Also, the kernel was blazing fast because there was no meaningful context transition from userland to kernel; everything was memory-pointer based, and all memory was directly mapped and non-virtual.
Therefore, it was also fragile. But that was an acceptable cost for blazing speed and jaw-dropping media performance at a time that MS-DOS machines were single-tasking, playing beeps and boops through a 2" speaker in the system case. and displaying EGA-level graphics.
So, let's not wax too nostalgic. True nostalgists wouldn't want this any more than an intelligent car collector will settle for a kit car body, even if it's on a more powerful and capable chassis than the original 1950s Ferrari (for instance).
Amiga enthusiasts who are curious or interested in one evolutionary path of the old OS might want to see this.
Other than that, I can't imagine this being a very popular product.
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